You've been told never to leave the house without it, and that it might be doing something to your body chemistry. Both claims have real evidence behind them.

Drive almost any road around Silverton, Telluride, or Durango and you'll pass gravel mounds and dark openings in the hillside. Colorado has roughly 23,000 of them. The history, the hazards, and what's being done about it.

You've held the can. The mountain on it is real: a specific 14,023-foot peak southeast of Telluride. The brewery, the founder who stowed away on a ship, the beer that couldn't be sold east of the Mississippi for most of a century, and the mountain that turned blue.